Photographers who want better metering of their scene should know that Sony has a bit more science to their camera metering system than you’d think. Besides the more traditional center-weighted, spot metering (which can be linked to the focusing point) and evaluative metering modes, there is another another option called “Entire Screen Average.” To figure out how that works, we asked Sony’s Mark Weir about just how exactly the algorithms do their magic. “Entire Screen Averaging meters the entire frame, but differs from Multi-pattern metering by eliminating the weighting on any individual segment.” says Mark. “The idea is to avoid any shifts in exposure that might be influenced by slight changes in composition.”

What that basically means is that it finds a way to look at all the different segments and averages them out, so it truly is an average of all the segments on the screen. This can be really useful in most situations. In other situations, spot metering is still my go to method when using Sony cameras.